Top 102 Quotes & Sayings by Monty Don

What I love about French gardens is the combination of formal elegance and intellectual questioning.

I had a difficult relationship with my parents, who died young, but they instilled self-discipline and a sense of honour and loyalty and accountability. I'm grateful for that.

The British have such an odd relationship with food - and the land. I want the public and the Soil Association to see that growing things in a garden is no different to growing things in a field.

I like dogs because they are not humans.

I am always more interested in people than plants. Nature doesn't make gardens, people make gardens. And the story of a garden is always the story of a person.

Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection - charm.

The farm uses up a lot of my creative urges. It's a sort of rough and ready space, I don't film there.

Gardening is inevitably a process of constant, remorseless change. It is the constancy of that process that is so comforting, not any fixed moment.

I was a sickly child, and it wasn't until I was 19 that I realised I was quite a robust, vigorous person. Since then I've taken ill health to be an irritating interruption into what is a fairly reliable stream of good health.

I don't think about being the Colin Firth of the gardening world. I live a very insular world based around my family and my home, and to them I'm not the Colin Firth of anything.

Intellectually the French are wonderfully open, in a way the British just don't begin to be. You can question ideas in France, endlessly. In Britain, two things happen when you do that. Either you're branded an intellectual, which is fundamentally mistrusted, or you're branded a phony and pretentious, which people despise.

I often eat cakes while my fingers are caked in soil.

Organic is loaded with a sense of rightness, with a set of rules. I would much rather someone bought food that was local and sustainable but not organic than bought organic food that had to be shipped across the world.

As you get older your own problems are not that interesting.

From the ages of 18 to 50 I ran, rowed and lifted weights at my home gym.

There is a direct correlation between gardening and mental health, not just to maintain good mental health but to repair it as well - that's anything in the gamut from depression to serious brain damage, schizophrenia or autism.

Plant breeding has been going on for millennia and it's a gradual process.

There is a British assumption that you mustn't speak evil of anyone's garden because it is rude - it is like criticising their home, their children or their pets.

When our jewellery business went into receivership we avoided bankruptcy by selling our houses and possessions.

For every gardener there is a minimum level of engagement that is needed to sustain and develop the relationship. There is no magic figure to this and it will vary from person to person and season to season, but it is there.

I see myself as a writer who happens to garden.

Visiting gardens is bad for you. Not only does it encourage too much eating of cake but sets up all kinds of false notions that are ruinous to your garden back home.

I just think that gardening is about the future, a slow thing, that is deep and spiritual as well as spiritually rewarding.

That first snowdrop, the flowering of the rose you pruned, a lettuce you grew from seed, the robin singing just for you. These are smallthings but all positive, all healing in a way that medicine tries to mimic.

Gardening is easy. Stick it in the ground the right way up and most plants will grow perfectly well.

When you plant something, you invest in a beautiful future amidst a stressful, chaotic and, at times, downright appalling world.

Gardening is seen as a pastime that is almost like belonging to the Church of England - a sign of maturity and wisdom and right thinking.

Blackthorn has wicked spikes that are highly brittle and tend to snap off under the skin and then fester horribly. This means that they can only really be part of a hedge that you do not want to get too close to.

If I'm honest, the thing I am proudest of is my varieties of wild flowers in the hay meadow.

Absorbing a healthy amount of dirt builds your immune system.

Chickweed is regarded by most gardeners as just that - a weed - but is excellent in sandwiches or salads.

The key to our oldest woodland is that it has been cut down and regrown, in some cases as often as 50 or 60 times. It is one of the most perfectly sustainable resources and ecosystems known to man.

My gardening apprenticeship was similar to the way a chimney sweep is pushed up a chimney. It was enforced by my parents, non-negotiable - it would be weeding the strawberries, mowing the grass.

I live in the middle of country so I walk a lot.

My father was an army officer who left the forces when I was six and never really fitted back into civilian life. My mother had five children and a mother with Alzheimer's, who lived with us, so I imagined that she had a lot to do.

I'm a great believer in trying things, so I've eaten witchetty grubs, a mountain frog, ostrich and alligator. I like tongue, I like brains and tripe.

The thing the British hate more than anything else is people who are getting above themselves. There are a hundred different expressions for it all around the country, but it comes down to the same thing: this inherent mistrust of authority, and trying to topple people off a pedestal.

By having a direct stake and involvement with the process of plants growing, of having your hands in the soil and tending it carefully and with love, your world and everyone's else's world too, becomes a better place.

Happiness is a by-product rather than an end in itself. It pops into your life unbidden, and then tends to pop out again. I'm on record as being depressive. It is related to winter.

We don't value food in Britain, so therefore the cheaper it is the better it is. We all eat far too much, we all pay far too little for our food. We have environmental problems, we have health problems, we have food transport problems.

You can trace the entire history of Britain by looking at gardens.

I love filming. I love the teamwork. It's a tight-knit group spending months on the road together. All the experience is shared.

The thing I like to stress about TV is that it's a team exercise. You really can't have too much of an ego.

I always see gardening as escape, as peace really. If you are angry or troubled, nothing provides the same solace as nurturing the soil.

We are extremely uncomfortable with the spiritual aspects of gardening, and yet most people feel it in some form or other, even if it's a sense of connection to the greater world on a beautiful day.

Woods are rich with biodiversity and, above all, places of trees and light that spangles a thousand greens through the leaves.

Tony Blair is a dreadful man; really truly dreadful.

I loathe nowheres - airports and bland hotels. I would rather be in an unpleasant, uncomfortable place rather than one just adrift, floating around.

It does seem to me that the British in particular, British horticultural literature and television programmes, focus a huge amount on how we garden and hardly at all on why we garden.

My favourite thorn belongs to the rose with a name like a mouthful of broken teeth, Rosa sericea pteracantha. It is grown almost entirely for its astonishing ruby-red shark's fin thorns that are at their lapidary best in early summer, especially when backlit by a low setting sun.

I feel ashamed if my hands are too clean and untouched. It's a measure of how much time I've spent travelling and poncing around.

I think that most people are aware that it takes so much oil and water to produce what they're eating. But the problem is inherent within the solution, in so much as you don't want to tell people what to do.

My basic philosophy is never do anything with the word 'celebrity' attached to it. Without being overly pompous, if you have worked hard to have an audience trust you a bit, why blow it? That is my currency.

In my teens I wanted to be a rock star, I really did. At that time there was nothing I wanted more.

The biggest obstacle to good gardening is the desire to know the answers and not the questions.

People are increasingly realising that what they eat is important. You can't put junk food in your body and be healthy. All sorts of problems can develop, like diabetes, heart disease, obesity, strokes. Gardening not only helps with exercise and mental health, but it can improve diet as well.

We know that gardening is good for you. It is fantastic, all-round exercise. That is easy to see and evaluate. It inculcates high levels of well-being. That is undeniable and needs little measurement.

I wouldn't want to be known as Mr Depression, but I found that when I did dip a toe in the water and talk about it, the response from the public was incredible.

I was brought up a strict Christian. My father was a lay preacher, my mother a church warden. The rhythm and ritual of the Anglican Church was part of our lives.

I'm bad at sleeping. I get somewhere between three and six hours a night.